Nostalgia can lead us astray sometimes.
The other day, I mentioned something online about Pluto no longer being an official planet, and was struck by how many people responded with annoyance.
Many of us were taught in school that there were nine planets, with Mercury closest to the sun and distant Pluto the farthest away.
Then in 2006, the International Astronomical Union agreed on a new three-part standard for what constitutes a planet. Pluto only meets two out of three, so it was officially designated a “dwarf planet.”
This was met with outrage.
How dare those astronomers (who study space for a living) tell us (not astronomers, can identify maybe two constellations) what is and is not a planet!
I’ve seen the same thing with depictions of feathered dinosaurs, especially velociraptors.
Jurassic Park (one of the greatest films of all time) of course showed all its dinosaurs with scaly skin, as they had been depicted since the Victorian era.
But it hit theatres in 1993, as we were in the early phases of a major shakeup in palaeontology – we are now certain that many dinosaurs were covered in feathers.
Within a few years of the film coming out, the evidence was overwhelming. Many small and medium-sized dinosaurs, including velociraptor, resembled large, toothy birds.
But people who have not thought about dinosaurs since they saw Jurassic Park sometimes venture online, discover modern artistic renderings of these dinos, and flip out.
Those dinosaurs, they shriek, just don’t look cool! They don’t look scary!
I’ve even seen feathered dinosaurs called “woke,” which is… I don’t know what that is. It’s too stupid to warrant a response.
These reactions to Pluto and raptors are based on nostalgia. We learned one thing as children, we formed an emotional attachment to that knowledge, and we resent having to learn something new.
But Pluto’s status as a planet is a lot younger than you probably think.
If you were learning the names of the planets in the 1830s, you would have been told about Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.
Those four objects between Mars and Jupiter are now considered either dwarf planets – like Pluto – or asteroids. Neptune wasn’t discovered until 1846, and Pluto wasn’t found until 1930. Pluto the animated Disney character is technically older than the dwarf planet!
I suspect there were some folks who would have worn a “Ceres is so a planet!” shirt in the 1840s, if they’d had snarky T-shirts back then.
But science marches on. Those people’s kids learned about the asteroid belt, and eventually about Neptune.
I learned dinosaurs were all scaly and cold-blooded, then I learned many were warm-blooded and feathered. Somehow I survived taking in new information.
And all that new info – it’s a lot of fun! Thanks to studies of fossilized dinosaur feathers, we actually know what colour some of them were! And thanks to the discovery of many dwarf planets, our solar system is more crowded and interesting than we thought possible.
Nostalgia is fine. But learning is a heck of a lot more fun.